Pre-planning, planning, and finally taking a 2-continent trip on bike through the Americas. Please observe the hand signals.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Distance & Timing

So if I've learned nothing else in the past 48 hours, it's be careful what you wish for.

No sooner than I mention that I'll need to start removing myself from the painting biz and putting my income on autopilot that I give the most expensive estimate to date: $9200.00. I gave this last night to a client, who surprisingly didn't balk at the cost, and wanted to know how quickly we could move forward. This was assuming I could find her a carpenter and floor guy to take care of some things before we got started with the painting, which I'll also get a nice finder's fee from. So basically, she's wanting to refinish her floors, remove an A/C unit, whitewash some exposed brick, remove and replace all her baseboards, and paint her entire split-level apartment -- oh yes, and all in 3 weeks, please.

So instead of enjoying my Sunday off and as well as the illusion of me ever actually taking this trip, I've been in the office all day, writing up her project, finding a carpenter, sending emails all around, and what the hell, let's clean out that inbox too. Definitely going to be a rush job, but it will give me a nice boost, and enough of a time buffer to continue to work on automating as much as I can to spend more of that time to planning the trip.

And of course, I have to wake up in 4 hours to start another project. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

(sorry, couldn't help myself...for anyone needing a helping hand with that one....)

Ok, so, catching up....

What I wanted to find out first was how long I would realistically expect to be on this trip, and even better, so I could look back afterward and laugh about just how far off I was.

The first thing I needed to calculate was the distance. And this is where the North/South digital divide immediately smacked me in the face. I admit it...I went to Mapquest and Google Maps first, to find driving directions from New York to Buenos Aires, Argentina, one of the southern-most cities in South America. Go ahead, let it out.

Ok, how about just a google search of "driving distance New York Buenos Aires". Nothin. Since there are clearly no other online options aside from Google, I decided to just take what I could get from the results, and refine things later on. This was just going to be a rough estimate, anyway.

The best I could find were a few sites on the straight-line distance between the two cities, which was a little over 5,000 miles (insert flying-bike-joke here). However, I returned to MapQuest and got back a 1700-mile trip from NY to Houston, TX, which was about 1/4th the distance, as far as I could eyeball it on a map.

So, I figured:

1700 x 4 = 6800 milesAdding some mileage for detours, I rounded up to 10,000 milesThen I figured I better add a good buffer in case I was way off, so I brought it up to 12,000 miles

So, 12,000 miles from NY to Buenos Aires.

Now for the speed. According to my slave-master Google, the average biker can peddle 17 - 23 mph on the road. I wanted to still leave some room for error, especially with the rough roads I know I'll be hitting, so I downgraded it to 15mph as an average.

So, it would take 4.5 months biking non-stop every day, for 6 hours per day, one-way.

So 6 months wasn't that far off, considering I'll obviously be stopping for days at a time to rest, enjoy, and check the mountains of email that have accumulated (oh yes, technology is definitely coming with me), but this is also assuming that this will be a one-way trip. I haven't made that decision yet, so I guess I should be prepared for a full year just in case.